The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

BRAIN, MIND AND SOCIETY with MARILYN FERGUSON

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic
today is "Brain, Mind, and Society." We're going to examine the ways in
which leading developments in brain research and psychology are effecting
global cultural change. With me today is Marilyn Ferguson, a Renaissance
woman, publisher of the Brain/Mind Bulletin, which is published
in Los Angeles, and author of several best sellers, including The Brain
Revolution and The Aquarian Conspiracy. Welcome, Marilyn.

MARILYN FERGUSON: Thank you, Jeff.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know,
you are really noted as a generalist, a person who can find patterns and
meaning in very, very diverse fields. Your writings include a wide range
of subject areas, from spiritual literature to brain research to new developments
in social reform. In your book The Aquarian Conspiracy you refer to these
developments -- and I think you shocked many reviewers and many readers
-- as a conspiracy. I wonder if we could begin by defining what this conspiracy
of social elements was to you.

FERGUSON: I use the word conspiracy in a positive sense,
and that's pretty unconventional. If you try, you have to think pretty
hard before you can come up with a positive conspiracy, normally. But that
seemed right. It seemed like the right word, because it did seem, when
this occurred to me around 1976 as I was first beginning work on this book,
that there were people who in a sense had a plot to make things work. They
were helping each other across many different fields, disciplines, different
parts of the world. And it occurred to me also at that time that the word
conspire came from roots meaning "to breathe together, to be in harmony."
It didn't originally have a negative meaning; it was not just conspiracies
to take over governments and fix prices and so on.

MISHLOVE: It's close to inspiration, in that sense.

FERGUSON: Yes, that's true. And I used the term Aquarian
to try to make clear that it was something benign. I didn't realize at
that time that there are people for whom that word might push buttons,
but I was really looking at it in the sense of the myth of a new beginning
-- the wish, the hope, the popular image that there might be a new time,
as in the words from the song "The Age of Aquarius" -- the time of the
mind's true liberation. And about that time I also discovered that Pierre
Teilhard De Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist, had once written about
a conspiracy of love -- that if anything was going to save this society,
it would be a conspiracy of men and women of good will. And the Greek novelist
Nikos Kazantzakis had once written, "I hope to say a word in time to my
companions, a password, like conspirators." And he went on to talk about
giving a human meaning to the superhuman struggle, to give to the earth
a heart and a brain.

MISHLOVE: Well, it's many years since The Aquarian Conspiracy
first came out; it's now going into a new edition -- but there's a sense
in which it's become more than just a conspiracy. It's becoming a major
social movement. It's taking a funny twist.

FERGUSON: It's becoming mainstream.

MISHLOVE: A lot of research in science, for example --
brain researchers such as Karl Pribram coming out and saying that based
on his holographic theory of the brain, we can begin to look at spiritual
experience. And people who have been very rationalist all their lives saying
we must look at the non-rational side.

FERGUSON: And people valuing the experiential. The French
writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who commented on America after the Revolution
in the 1830s in a book called Democracy in America, said in there: "I should
be surprised if some day America didn't become spiritual. Any society this
materialistic is eventually going to become spiritual." I think that was
an interesting processing on his part, a social observation. Because right
now we are seeing how insecure our former securities have been, and our
economic bastions and so on, and we can look at our wishful thinking, and
realize that we need to have something that is more deeply substantial
and meaningful in our lives.

MISHLOVE: You have an interesting quote that really stimulated
me in this regard -- something to the effect that the worse things seem
to be, the better they may be.

FERGUSON: Well, things do have to fall apart before you
can rebuild them. There's a saying in our culture, "If it works, don't
fix it." I think it's taken to the extent that we believe if it works even
a little bit, don't fix it, because I don't know if I can handle the period
of time between when we first stop doing it the old way and when the new
way starts to really work. There's a period of time -- a man I know who's
a management consultant calls it the "confusion gap" -- when during a period
of transition things are bound to become briefly more chaotic and more
confused, because you are going through the process of readjusting and
realigning or renewing. In a company, an organization, a government agency,
or in the family, during that period he calls the confusion gap, people
in a sense want to run back to the old way, because at least it was familiar.
You were asking me before we went on about the theories of Ilya Prigogine
that I talked about in The Aquarian Conspiracy. I think that you see it
even more clearly now. Prigogine won the Nobel Prize, I believe it was
in 1977, for what was called the theory of dissipative structures. It's
a very tricky one to talk about, but to make a long theory short, what
it has to do with is that in living systems, in what he calls dissipative
structures -- that is, organisms that are held together by energy that
flows through the system -- that from time to time there are sharp shifts
in this energy. At a certain point the old form can't hold; the structure
itself falls apart. This happens in certain natural processes. And, strangely
enough, it reorganizes at a higher level of complexity; it becomes more
ordered. When I first heard about Prigogine's theory, I was thrilled.

MISHLOVE: He demonstrates this in chemistry.

FERGUSON: In the laboratory.

MISHLOVE: He'll take a test tube of different chemicals
and shake them up, and it looks all chaotic, and all of a sudden exquisite
patterns form, right there in the test tube, or in the laboratory flask.

FERGUSON: And we know in our personal lives, that very
often going through a period of great falling apart, what seems like the
worst of disasters in retrospect turns out to have been the greatest of
blessings -- something new, deeper, more useful, more meaningful has come
out of this period of change. In a way, I guess, Jeffrey, we're talking
about the importance of learning to embrace change, and it's a lesson that
our society has been getting. The ideas that I talked about in The Aquarian
Conspiracy were very difficult to discuss on a talk show in 1980, and in
fact it was very difficult for somebody planning a talk show to even have
a glimmering of what that was, how to simplify it. Two TV shows that I
went on, the audience-participation kind, the host said to me -- this was
1980. Before I went on, I swear to you, two different hosts said the same
thing: "Now don't make a fool of me."

MISHLOVE: Because they hadn't any way to get a handle
on what you were saying.

FERGUSON: Yes. I mean, there was no way I intended to
embarrass them, because I didn't even think, and I still don't think, that
what I was talking about is that difficult or intellectually challenging.
But at that point we were like -- I believe it was Darwin who wrote about
how at one point the natives on a certain island could not see the ship
coming, because they'd never seen a ship of that size. It was as if their
eyes couldn't accustom themselves, didn't look there. And now we think
about the new age having become fashionable, almost dangerously fashionable
-- not dangerous to the society, but dangerous to the concepts. You know,
it could be oversimplified, or become a pop thing that comes and goes.
But now it makes sense to say the values we should look to are our spiritual
values. The stock market crash around the world -- the new shot heart around
the world -- I think made it very clear that the world economies are tied
in together, and that doing it with mirrors doesn't work anymore. We may
be -- I hope that we're not in for a Great Depression; I don't really think
we are -- but even a severe economic shakeup may do what in some ways the
Great Depression did. When I was a child my parents used to look back on
the Depression almost with affection. I'm sure you've heard people talk
that way.

MISHLOVE: One gets a sense that of all of the families
and the young children who knew poverty during that time --

FERGUSON: And how they amused themselves.

MISHLOVE: Right, and how they really learned the values
of self reliance and so on. It became a little bit one-sided, perhaps,
but when everybody becomes aware of the problem on that level, then they
start to do something about it.

FERGUSON: And when what has perhaps been the injustice
is spread around a little more -- it's like a blackout, it's like a flood,
it's like the earthquake we had in Los Angeles -- all of a sudden strangers
talk to strangers. We shouldn't need a calamity for that to happen, and
I think maybe it was an interesting coincidence that the earthquake so
quickly preceded, it was so shortly thereafter, that the stock market crash
occurred, and the news commentators and the people on Wall Street were
saying, "Is this the big one?" Somehow it's like a splash of cold water.
You need that every once in a while because we've become complacent. We
drift. And cultures stagnate as well as economies. So to wake up, I think,
in a way is becoming a respectable goal, whereas before people said, "What
do you mean? I'm not asleep." There has been research suggesting that most
adults are more or less half asleep all the time. Our EEGs don't even show
that we're awake.

MISHLOVE: That's very interesting. Well, it almost seems
to me, if one tries to relate the spiritual literature, which says we're
all one, with our society, which seems to create barriers all of the time,
and we view ourselves as separate -- and even biologically we think we
are separate organisms, rather than part of one environment by and large
-- that we need these experiences of shock, I suppose, to break through
the crust of separation that we've created.

FERGUSON: It's also closely related to the idea of the
now infamous near-death experience. I think by now the near-death experience
has been described so romantically that people who haven't had one are
jealous of those who have. It's a hard way to wake up, but in retrospect
people are glad that it happened to them.

MISHLOVE: People find that their lives are extremely transformed
by having had that contact with such an intense dose of spiritual reality.

FERGUSON: Some famous writer, I can't remember who --
Koestler or Hemingway or somebody who was once in a prison and thought
he was going to lose his life in the morning -- said, "There's nothing
like knowing you're going to be shot at dawn to focus your attention."
When you said that the spiritual literature says we're all one, and it
isn't necessarily real to people, it made me think of a time I was on a
program in Santa Barbara. It was a program on spirit and science, and there
were a number of speakers, and we all went out to dinner. As we started
to order, someone in the group -- it was Fritjof Capra, I think -- said,
"We are all one; but separate checks, please." And that is a paradox of
our time, because even when we realize our interdependence, in a practical
sense people feel: well, I'd like to do something about the homeless; or,
I'd like to do something about the hungry. And they tend to think of the
problem on such a large scale that they feel helpless. You feel as if,
"What can I do? What good would it be?" Part of what I've been working
on the last few years is another piece of writing about something we're
calling the new common sense, that has to do with how people have an idea,
or an image, a vision -- how visionaries live. We all have a visionary
capacity. But how do people have an idea and then make it happen, and have
another idea and make it happen? Or even, how do they keep renewing this
thing that may have been successful; but if you don't keep changing, successful
things become dead? A lot of it, I think, has to do with realizing that
everything starts locally. I think it was Rene Dubos who originally said
this.

MISHLOVE: "Think globally; act locally."

FERGUSON: "Think globally; act locally." And it became
the theme of futurist conferences. It's a wonderful saying. A while back
it occurred to me that maybe the point needs to be made that everything
has to start somewhere.

MISHLOVE: I suppose it's a question of the here and now.
I mean, every moment is an opportunity for being in touch.

FERGUSON: And big projects start from tiny little acts.

MISHLOVE: It can just be a question of maybe opening up
a little more when you say hello to your neighbor.

FERGUSON: Absolutely. Not long ago there was a television
documentary that I saw, about Supreme Court rulings. In virtually every
important case, it was what appeared to be a minor local concern that was
bumped up and up and up through the courts, and became some kind of momentous,
landmark decision. But it was a carpenter here; it was Rosa Parks on the
bus. It's the integrity of your individual act. And it all comes from individuals,
too. It doesn't come from groups. Institutions don't do anything. We have
anthropomorphized institutions; we say, "The University of California announced
such and such, did such and such. General Motors did this. The U.S. does
that."

MISHLOVE: You see these cartoons of the buildings talking
to each other.

FERGUSON: Right. In fact, I resent sometimes seeing the
headlines that say, "U.S. Does Such and Such," when it turns out that it
was a couple of people in the administration who made an announcement.
I didn't do that; you didn't do that. It was like an individual somewhere
said something, and I think that in a way we disempower ourselves when
we think of great institutions and companies and agencies and organizations
doing the wheeling and dealing. We also aren't holding individuals responsible.
A man I know who is the head of human resources training for a large national
company said that one day he was driving to work, and he suddenly had this
realization, and when he got up to his office he said to his secretary,
"Do you realize that TRW doesn't exist?" And she said, "Can I get you a
cup of coffee?" She left, and pretty soon he called in two more employees
to his office, and he said, "Do you realize that TRW doesn't really exist,
that there is no TRW in the way we think of it?" And one of the people
said, "Well, sure there is. There's this building." He said, "We lease
this building." He said, "It's all people. It's individuals. And in our
mind we have made this into a company." I remember one time that a couple
of friends and I were trying to battle a situation in our part of Los Angeles,
where a neighboring community was trying to force a freeway away from them,
which was OK, but they wanted to put it through our park. We didn't think
that was a good idea, so we began organizing to protest and so on. Various
groups of neighbors would come to the hearings, but at some point we wanted
to be able to act in an official way. One man had a brother-in-law who
was a printer, and the brother-in-law printed stationery that said, "Save
the Arroyo Foundation." There were basically three of us in the Save the
Arroyo Foundation, but we had elegant stationery. And pretty soon they
would announce, when CalTrans held their hearings, "This bill is opposed
by the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, the Sierra Club,
and the Save the Arroyo Foundation." People, I think, have no idea what
a vacuum of power there is. In much the same way, I think that we have
missed a lot of territory where there's power where we could take action
-- not just in political situations, but in terms of taking advantage of
the science. If we wait around for the scientists to tell us what it means,
we're going to wait a long time.

MISHLOVE: But there is a sense, I think, in which the
new brain research and the research in parapsychology is suggesting to
us that we have an enormous amount of latent power -- that everybody could
be a visionary, everybody could be a decision maker, a person who exercises
their free will.

FERGUSON: Everybody could be a leader. Leadership in a
way is a rotating function; it isn't a person. I think of the movie The
Flight of the Phoenix, in which James Stewart took leadership of a group
of people whose plane had crashed, because he happened to know something
about airplanes. It turned out it was model airplanes, but at that moment
he knew more than anybody else did. And indeed I think we're learning from
practical experiments -- like for example the effort to teach thinking
in elementary school, and research from laboratory experiments -- that
we do have these latent intelligences, and that we've greatly underestmated
who we are, what we can do.

MISHLOVE: We seem to be learning more and more about the
mechanisms by which we would deny ourselves. We repress our abilities,
or we almost hypnotize ourselves into thinking that we don't have this
enormous amount of creative power.

FERGUSON: We anesthetize ourselves, you're right. There's
a new disorder that they've given a name, alexithymia. It means when they
ask you how you feel, you can't tell them; you can't read your own feelings,
basically. And I think this is a natural consequence of a failure to appreciate
even our very sensory systems. Forget extrasensory; extrasensory I think
flows naturally out of waking up our other senses. But for various reasons,
often emotional or cultural-behavioral, we quit seeing what's there, we
quit hearing. Our listening becomes selective; we develop a certain kind
of tunnel vision. And who is to say? It happens day by day by day; it isn't
that you wake up one day and say, "I can't see anything." No, it's just
a gradual phenomenon. And it isn't just modern society. Wordsworth wrote
about it in his famous poem "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality": when
we were little children, trailing clouds of glory do we come; and then
gradually the prison house of custom closes in. So I think a lot of what's
happening now is that people get a glimmer of being awake here, and they
say, "Hey, I like that."

MISHLOVE: So in effect, what you're talking about, using
the metaphors and the research of modern science, is really part of the
human dilemma, essentially. It's an age-old problem; and Marilyn, you've
expressed, in effect, a lifelong commitment to helping wake people up through
your writing and through this social organization that you do, and through
the attempt that you're making to unify all of these diverse disciplines,
and show people there is an optimistic viewpoint, there is a way in which
we can tune in to the positive changes that are happening, and then allow
them to occur -- to get on the bandwagon of the good things.

FERGUSON: Well, one of the things that I've noticed, Jeffrey,
is that people don't have a sense of purpose. Most people don't have a
sense of purpose. One time my husband, Ray Gottlieb, and I were doing a
seminar for about four hundred people in Canada, and I just suddenly, impulsively
asked the audience, "How many of you feel you have a sense of purpose,
you know what your purpose is?" And maybe one out of four, one out of five,
raised their hand. I thought, this is a pretty select group of people.
They came to a seminar in order to be more awake; they cared about it,
they had some concern. So I started to think: all right, the people who
do have a purpose, those people that I know, where did it come from? Working
my way backward from that, I came up with kind of a scheme, so that if
people don't have a purpose, here's how, here's the recipe. You look around
you in this society, and you take your own powers of observation seriously
enough that you decide what you think needs doing. What's missing? What
ought to be happening? And then of those things that you have taken notice
of, you pick the ones that you think most need doing, that people are not
paying enough attention to. Then you're like the boy who had to stick his
finger in the dike. You are the person who saw this. This is now your cause.
It gives you a reason to wake up in the morning. And what I've found over
the period of about six or seven years now that I've really been looking
at this phenomenon of achievement, what I call visionary behavior, is that
one of the most important qualities of a visionary person is passion --
caring, energy, the ability to pick oneself up and dust oneself off and
keep going again. And the only way you get that is to have a sense that
you might be able to do something, and that what this thing is that you
would do matters. What I've noticed is that if people have the idea that
they want to make a lot of money, or they want to be a writer, or be a
political leader or whatever, it doesn't work.

MISHLOVE: Ego gets in the way somehow.

FERGUSON: Yes, because what you have to want for it to
work, for you to achieve at a high enough level to make a contribution
at a valuable enough level that people will let you do it and want you
to do it, is you have to really want to serve. If you think of something
that you really want to give to people that they need, you may make a lot
of money from it. If you have a message that you really care about, then
you may work at it long enough and frame it clearly enough and go out there
and work at it long enough, that people read it or hear it or listen to
it. So it's service that seems to be another key factor.

MISHLOVE: And I suppose, without making it sound too altruistic,
another way to look at it is that if you really want to be selfish, do
it in the service of your higher self.

FERGUSON: Well, it's ironic, because it is both the most
selfish and the most selfless thing to do. Because we're not separate.
My welfare isn't separate from your welfare. And part of what we're talking
about as the new common sense is the sense of the whole. We have all of
these senses that we more or less take for granted, which may be or not
as alert as they could be. But what of the sense of the whole thing, including
that which we can't put our fingers on?

MISHLOVE: Because there's a sense in which -- speaking
of the new common sense -- all of the developments that are happening in
science and systems theory and Prigogine's work and brain science and social
thinking now, are leading to view things holistically.

FERGUSON: They're converging, yes.

MISHLOVE: And that's, I suppose, the basic conspiracy
-- that we realize we're all in this together.

FERGUSON: And the disciplines can't be separated. It was
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, I think, who said, "Nature doesn't know the difference.
Biology isn't separate from physics."

MISHLOVE: Marilyn, we're out of time now, so I'm going
to have to thank you very, very much for sharing this half hour with us.
It's been a pleasure to be with a person who's able to so beautifully and
calmly integrate these diverse teachings from physics, chemistry, social
science, and spiritual teachings. Again, thank you for being with me.